Basic Course Information

Time:	Wednesday, 7:20 - 10 pm
Meeting locations:	- GMU Arlington Campus, rm. 109 "Original" Building - Via interactive video conference (selected locations at VDOT in Virginia and Montana)
Instructor:	Todd M. La Porte
Telephone	(202) 686-7115 This is a home number; please don't call after 9pm
Fax:	(703) 993-8015
E-mail:	tlaporte at gmu.edu
Websites:	http://mason.gmu.edu/~tlaporte http://tpol.gmu.edu
Office location:	Arlington, rm. 248
Office hours:	Generally Tuesday through Thursday, 10:00 a.m. 6:00 p.m. An appointment is *strongly* recommended if you're making a special trip.
Sections:	TP2 for students enrolling using interactive TV (except Montana) 002 for students enrolling for attendance in Arlington Montana students enroll through Office of Continuing and Professional Education

Introduction

This course is the capstone of the Master's in Transportation Policy, Operations and Logistics. [1] The objective of the course is to engage students in an in-depth field study of ongoing transportation policy, operations, and/or logistics situations, and the design and delivery of actions to manage or resolve problems and opportunities.

For Spring 2004, the Wednesday evening sections will work with the United States Coast Guard. We will focus on transportation issues associated with marine critical infrastructures in the Washington DC metropolitan area. In consultation with Coast Guard senior staff, students working on this project will determine the most likely threat scenarios to marine critical infrastructures in the Washington Harbor area, such as bombing Reagan National airport or the destruction of a key Potomac River bridge.

With these scenarios in hand, students will then determine the transportation and economic impacts of shutting down these facilities on the local community, the county and the nation. Students will also investigate what agencies or entities would respond to the attack or incident, and what each brings to the response in terms of equipment, personnel, skills, response capacity, and the like. This will necessitate the project teams meeting with private sector and local, county, and federal government actors to discover how they work together in times of crisis.

The after-action report for the September 11th attack on the Pentagon will be a useful orienting document. It is available at http://www.co.arlington.va.us/fire/edu/about/presskit_sept11.htm. Questions the Coast Guard needs to answer are include: What are the gaps in the overall response to that incident? What are the gaps in completing a full recovery of a particular transportation route or mode?

Course Objective

The objective of the spring 2004 practicum is to provide an analysis of marine critical infrastructure in the Washington DC area, as outlined above. Students will present their analyses and recommendations at the end of the semester. The venue and organization of the project presentation will be determined as part of the project.

Class Requirements and Grading

The primary requirement of the course is to produce a report and recommendations to the external client. The student's grade will be based 50% on the overall quality of the formal reports and presentations for which he or she is responsible (that is, on the performance of group products), and 50% on the instructor's assessment of the individual student's contribution to the overall effort. To inform that assessment, each student will submit a self-assessment to the instructor on the date of the scheduled final exam for the course. The self-assessment will include a description of the student's contribution to the overall project, as well as what he or she learned. The self-assessment should also contain an assessment of the course PUBP 722 and of the TPOL program, and suggestions for improving them.

Course Organization and Logistics

A project course is different from a normal course in that there is not a set schedule of lectures and discussions. Rather, much of the work of the course takes place outside the classroom, working individually or in teams. Organizing this work and maintaining project control and quality is itself a major task, and requires effort. The following are possible project roles:

* Project leader/coordinator

* Project webmaster

* Project librarian (documents, e-documents, data)

* Project report coordinator

* Project presentation coordinator

* Project communications coordinator (liaison with outside parties to avoid multiple repeated requests to the same sources).

* Task leaders

In addition, the project itself will involve a number of tasks. The initial work of the course will be to define tasks and assign responsibilities.

Schedule

Classroom and video teleconference (VTC) time have been reserved according to a normal weekly schedule, and the instructor is available to meet with the class at this time. Subgroups of the class may wish to use the VTC facilities for a portion of the meeting time on weeks where status meetings are scheduled, or at other times as available.

Instructor

The course instructor is Todd M. La Porte, associate professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He is an authority on critical infrastructure policy, and on technology, organization and politics. He is currently engaged in research in this area with the Critical Infrastructure Working Group in SPP.

He earned his B.A. in political science and sociology fron Swarthmore College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. His dissertation was on the social organizational properties of large-scale information systems in France. He has also spent extended periods at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, France, and as a member of the faculty in the Technology, Policy and Mangement program at the Delft University of Technology. He was for six years an analyst at the U.S. Congress' Office of Technology Assessment, in both the national security and the information technology programs.

Honor Code

Plagiarism: All work must be your own. Inappropriate use of the work of others without attribution is plagiarism and a George Mason University Honor Code violation punishable by expulsion from the University. All students should familiarize themselves with this honor code provision (http://www.gmu.edu/‌facstaff/‌handbook/‌aD.html). To guard against plagiarism and to treat students equitably, written work may be checked against existing published materials or digital data bases available through various plagiarism detection services. Accordingly materials submitted to all courses must be available in electronic format.

[1] Students may be enrolled either in the Master of Science in Professional Studies in Transportation Policy, Operations & Logistics or the Master of Arts in Transportation Policy, Operations & Logistics.